The breadth and complexity of network security threats targeting modern data centers is far and wide, and ever growing. The list includes: Worms, Spoofing, Sniffing, Hijacking, Trojan Horses, Denial of Service attacks, and Phishing, to name but a few network security threats.
Network security solutions that rely on deploying network security appliances throughout the datacenter suffer from a number of shortcomings. It may not be economically or administratively feasible to provide the number of such appliances that would be needed to monitor high traffic volumes. Scaling the number of appliances out or in may also be complex and time-consuming. It may not be feasible to provide sufficient network port density to allow the appliances to access various parts of the datacenter network. It may also be difficult to keep the appliances up to date with the latest threat signatures. Deploying such appliances may be difficult, especially, for example, to protect a cloud computing environment.